which both appear in the text as “Openshaw et al (1999)” when I cite them. Other than using [fullnamesfirst] as an option to natbib is there a way to prevent them appearing to be citations of the same paper?

3 Answers
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Citing the two papers as "Openshaw et al (1999a)" and "Openshaw et al (1999b)" implies that those papers were written by the same co-authors, while in fact one author (John Davy) was part of the second, but not of the first author team. (Herbert's use of the alpha style avoids this problem.) Using author-year-styles, I would cite the papers as "Openshaw, Turton et al (1999)" and "Openshaw, Turton, Macgill et al (1999)". I'm not aware of a bibliography style that will do so automatically (disambiguation of author lists is on the roadmap for future versions of biblatex). Using natbib, you could define

in the text, but this solution is far from perfect (\citepalias would result in double parentheses).

UPDATE: Disambiguation of author names and name lists was implemented in biblatex v1.4, released on March 31st, 2011. See section 4.11.4 of the biblatex manual for details. Have a look at the following example with the package option uniquelist=true:

biblatex can do some of what you want. In fact, it will automatically add 1999a or 1999b with the style=authoryear style. This will not, however, deal with the problem lockstep mentioned: viz, the disambiguation of author lists. You could set the maxnames=4 option, and this would disambiguate the author lists, but that's probably suboptimal...